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At Buffer, we’re very lucky to obtain a whole lot of characteristic requests each month. Our group is keen to assist us enhance, and it’s an absolute blessing.
We’ve experimented with completely different processes for incorporating person suggestions and concepts into our product and maintaining our group knowledgeable of real-time updates, however it may be difficult to try this properly.
Within the spirit of transparency, it’s necessary to us that we let of us know when their requests are being labored on, whether or not their thought is technically attainable, or if there are different issues we have to prioritize.
At this time, I’m excited to share the following evolution of constructing along with our group, Buffer Strategies.
Learn on for the backstory of how we obtained right here and why we’re so enthusiastic about our new suggestions hub and clear roadmap.
Our first clear roadmap
Practically eight years in the past, we launched the primary model of our clear product roadmap.
It was a public Trello board with product solutions from customers organized by stage of growth. Anybody may vote and depart feedback on a suggestion.
To submit a suggestion, you’d should fill out a Typeform that was embedded on our web site.
We linked this Typeform to an inside Slack channel in order that we may keep watch over all submissions and have discussions about them.
Lastly, if we determined to discover a characteristic request, we might add it to the clear roadmap. Due to the amount of requests we obtained, solely a really small share of requests would make it to the roadmap.
It wasn’t the very best course of
This method of accumulating and managing characteristic requests labored pretty properly, however over time we began to determine some flaws.
Duplicate characteristic requests.
As a result of we did not publicly share each characteristic request, we ended up getting the identical request from completely different folks over and over.
Figuring out who requested the characteristic.
When contemplating whether or not to construct a brand new characteristic, it’s useful to know who the characteristic is for. At the moment, there was no method for us to attach a characteristic request to the person who shared it, past manually wanting up their electronic mail tackle in our database.
Preserving customers knowledgeable.
After submitting a characteristic request, the person didn’t obtain any observe notifications to allow them to know in regards to the standing of the request. Did we see it? Is it being labored on? Has it been declined? With such a lot of requests, it was nearly unattainable to maintain everybody posted on how their request was being dealt with.
A renewed deal with group and a brand new activity pressure
This yr, we recognized our group as a precedence for our crew.
Why?
We’ve a small advertising and marketing finances and no salespeople. Subsequently, we rely closely on folks having optimistic experiences with our product and our crew after which recommending us to their buddies to others.
Taking good care of our group and ensuring they really feel linked to us helps construct a greater product, develop our model, and it’s additionally simply the precise factor to do.
Our CEO, Joel Gascoigne, is likely one of the leaders behind our renewed group efforts. To get issues rolling, he created a brand new undertaking and taskforce to revamp how we acquire and work with characteristic requests. The duty pressure included Brandon from our Product crew, Adam from our Advocacy crew, Sofia from our Design crew, and me, from our Advertising and marketing crew.
A enjoyable, cross-functional crew!
The undertaking concerned figuring out and implementing a brand new, clear, customer-facing software to exchange the makeshift system we’d created utilizing Trello, Typeform, and Slack.
After doing a little analysis, we landed on featureOS.
With featureOS you’ll be able to centralize, manage, and reply to buyer requests in a single place. There are a selection of different instruments which can be related however we selected featureOS as a result of:
- They have been very aware of our suggestions. They even constructed a brand new characteristic for us!
- Their pricing felt cheap for our wants.
- They provide plenty of integrations.
- Their product felt intuitive.
With this new software, we set about creating model 2.0 of our clear product roadmap.
Probably the most thrilling factor about our new clear roadmap is that it’s, properly, much more clear!
You may see each characteristic request that has been submitted by the group. You may vote or remark in your favourite concepts. And, after all, you’ll be able to submit your individual. You can even select to get notified when a characteristic goes from being “Deliberate” to “In Progress,” or “In Progress” to “Full.”
And better of all, you should utilize your Buffer login credentials to do all of it.
Sharing your suggestions and concepts
Anybody can share a suggestion or vote on current solutions by going to solutions.buffer.com. Present solutions are sorted by probably the most upvotes, so the preferred solutions will likely be on the high.
You can even kind by recency, product growth stage, and votes by you.
All new solutions are robotically categorized as “In Overview”. This offers different customers the chance to upvote the request and our crew an opportunity to contemplate if and when so as to add it to our product roadmap!
So as to add your individual suggestion to the board, hit the Counsel a Function button and fill out the shape.
Viewing the product roadmap
You may see how the way forward for Buffer is shaping up by switching to the Roadmap view. On this view, solutions are sorted into Kanban-style columns. You may remark, vote, or subscribe to a submit from this view, too.
Getting notified about our progress
Whenever you submit a suggestion, you’ll robotically obtain an electronic mail at any time when somebody feedback on the suggestion or its standing modifications. You can even subscribe to different solutions to remain up-to-date with any modifications.
Over to you!
What ought to we construct subsequent? We might love so that you can assist us form the way forward for Buffer by including your votes and solutions to our new roadmap. We won’t wait to see your concepts!
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